Do we need or want any form of government?

A.

1983
Contents
TO BE GOVERNED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
TO BE GOVERNED IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
TO BE GOVERNED IN HOBBES’ LEVIATHAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
TO BE GOVERNED BY A DEMOCRACY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
TO BE GOVERNED IN GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
TO BE GOVERNED BY THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT . . . . . 6
ANARCHISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2
 Political philosophers have examined what kind of government is, in their opinion, the best
kind. In voluminous writings justifying various forms of government they either ignore or
quickly dispense with the more fundamental question: DO WE NEED OR WANT ANY FORM
OF GOVERNMENT?
What is it to be governed? And what is the alternative?

TO BE GOVERNED
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, num-
bered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, censored, commanded, by creatures who
have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to
be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped,
measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbid-
den, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the
name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, ex-
ploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slight-
est resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed,
hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, con-
demned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown it all, mocked,
ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice, that
is its morality.1

If Proudhon’s description of government sounds too rhetorical or too politically prejudiced,

turn to the Oxford English Dictionary for a definition of government: it says that to govern is
to rule, conduct, regulate, command, curb, control, sway, influence and determine. These are the
same as verbs which Proudhon uses, but they are in the active tense - the tense of the ’doer’. Most
of us receive government in the tense of the ’done to’.
Why should we be ruled, conducted, regulated, commanded, curbed, controlled, swayed, influ-
enced and determined by others?
The function of government is supposedly the control of the less enlightened by the more
enlightened. Is there really one group of people more enlightened than the rest - or do they have
different, rather than better, ideas? By whose standards are they judged to be more enlightened?
And if there is a more enlightened group, why should they dictate to others rather than share
their enlightenment with them?

Why divide men into two classes, one of which is to think and reason for the whole,
and the other to take the conclusions of their superiors on trust? This distinction
is not founded in the nature of things; there is no such difference between man and
man as it thinks proper to suppose. The reasons that should convince us that virtue is
better than vice are neither complicated nor abstruse; and the less they be tampered
with by the injudicious interference of political institutions, the more they will come
home to the understanding and approve themselves to the judgement of every man.2

1
P.J. Proudhon, in Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia p. 11
2
William Godwin, in Woodcock’s Anarchism p. 76

3
 Goldwin hints that what government does is to obscure rather than to elucidate. It deliberately
keeps the majority of people in the dark in order that the few can get their own way (to power,
wealth, and so on) with a minimum of opposition. Is government not an enlightened guide bu a
Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity?
Let us look at what it means to be governed by some of the systems of government advocated
by political philosophers.

TO BE GOVERNED IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC

To be governed by the system of Plato’s Republic would entail being subject to a ruling class
of Guardians or Philosopher Rulers. Plato divides people into those who have an economic func-
tion and those who have a ruling or military function. The economic class may live in a capitalist
structure, but the Guardians live communally with no private property and no nuclear family,
in order to prevent private interest superseding the common interest in the Guardian class. The
Guardians have all political power and no economic function. Plato has separated reason (the
Guardians) and spirit (their Auxiliaries) from appetite (most of the people, who have an eco-
nomic role). The Guardians would be thoroughly educated - but they would have no practical
understanding of the people they were ruling as they would be living totally different lives. This
system begs Godwin’s question: why divide people into two classes…?
Plato draws the analogy between the soul and the state. If the soul and the state are each
composed of reason, spirit and appetite, does it make sense to then suggest that people should
stop being a balance of all three components and take up a role as either reason/Guardian, spirit/
Auxiliary or appetite/economic function? This may theoretically lead to a balanced state, but how
can this lead to a balanced individual?
Also, the notion of totally separate classes which do not interbreed creates a situation familiar
to the Aryan philosophy of different races having different functions and different values. The
horrific outcome of that kind of philosophy was realized in the slaughter of the Jews in Hitler’s
Germany. So to be governed in Plato’s Republic is to live a totally different and separate life from
the people who have political power over you.

TO BE GOVERNED IN HOBBES’ LEVIATHAN

Hobbes’ political philosophy rests on two assumptions: that the state of nature (i.e. people with-
out government) is a state of war, and that everybody wants to avoid death. He moves through
four abstractions - the State of Nature, the Right of Nature, the Law of Nature and the Social
Contract - to reach his conclusion that the only way for people to avoid death and provide a safe
and comfortable way of life for themselves was for them to acknowledge a perpetual sovereign
power, against which each of them was powerless.
To be governed in Hobbes’ system is to accept the power of a person or group over you because
you fear that, without them keeping order, you could not survive.

The problem with both the Platonic and the Hobbesian solution is that in the interests of
authority the majority of people lose their autonomy. Proponents of social contract theories such
as that of Rousseau say that the solution to the conflict between authority and autonomy lies in
democracy. What does it mean, to be governed by a democracy?

4
TO BE GOVERNED BY A DEMOCRACY
The theory of democracy is that everybody participates in government. By being bother the
makers and the obeyers of the law they can combine the benefits of authority with the freedoms of
autonomy. The government is the executor of the people’s will. In ’The Social Contract’ Rousseau
says:
…every person, while uniting himself with all, … obeys only himself and remains
free as before.
How does this turn out in practice?
In a unanimous direct democracy - a democracy in which every law which is passed and every
decision which is made is decided upon by every person in the society to whom it will apply
- it would be true to say that every person unites with all and still only obeys themself. This
would be possible only in very small communities of like-minded people - possibly in kibbutzim.
However, it is difficult to see what the meaning of authority is in such a situation - if people
are obeying themselves then they are being autonomous, and if their opinions coincide and they
all act together, they are still being autonomous. To call coinciding autonomy ’authority’ is a
dubious verbal solution - the notion of authority is redundant in a situation where each person
obeys their own decision.
As societies are usually too big for unanimous direct democracy the more prevalent form of
democracy is a representative democracy. There are various forms of representative democracy,
but most of them are neither truly representative nor truly democratic.
Representative democracy entails people choosing from a limited number of candidates the
one whose general political platform is nearest to their own. All the issues that the ’representative’
will be deciding on will not be known at the times of the election, and of those that are known
there is unlikely to be a representative for every view - let alone for every combination of views:
Suppose, for example, that in an American election there are four main issues: a farm
bill, medical care for the aged, the extension of the draft, and civil rights. Simplifying
the real world considerably, we can suppose that there are three alternative courses
of action seriously being considered on the first issue, four on the second, two on
the third, and three on the last. These are then 3×4×2×3=72 possible stands which a
man might take on these four issues.3
Therefore, if in this hypothetical situation there were fewer than seventy-two different can-
didates then this ’representative democracy’ does not preserve the autonomy of a unanimous
direct democracy.
Unanimous direct democracy relies on everybody agreeing about everything. This is very rare.
As soon as people disagree the notion of majority rule is introduced - everybody should abide by
the decision of the majority. Under the majority rule the majority retain their autonomy and the
minority (which may be as many as 49%) have to submit to authority. If the minority submit to
authority then they lose their autonomy, and if they retain their autonomy by not co-operating
with the government then they deny the authority of that government.
If people agree to majority rule they agree to be bound by laws which they do not will, and
therefore they agree to voluntary slavery.
3
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism p. 33

5
TO BE GOVERNED IN GREAT BRITAIN
In this country once every four or five years people vote in a general election. They usually vote
for one of three main political platforms, which are unlikely to coincide exactly with the views
many people hold. The choice is narrow - it is between three variations of a mixed economy.
There is no radically different alternative within the parliamentary system. Frequently people
vote not for what they consider to be the right sort of government, but for what appears to be the
least worst choice. Voting is affected by which they think is the least worst for them personally;
which they think is the least worst for the nation as a whole; and which they think has a chance of
winning - there is a long history of people not voting for the middle party because they think it has
no chance of winning. The decision is restricted still further by the information the parties choose
to market - often with the aid of an advertising agency. Politics is packaged like soap powder -
each year two million pounds of taxpayers’ money goes to advertising companies. Recently the
conservative party was proposing to spend a million pounds on anti-C.N.D. advertising. Politics
is big business - and people’s decisions are bound to be influenced by those in control of the
business.
To be governed in a so-called democracy such as ours is to be sold the illusion that people are
participating in decision-making, whilst in reality a small hierarchical group of capitalists and
politicians are in control.

TO BE GOVERNED BY THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

Revolutionary socialists and Marxists of various kinds believe that capitalism and its accom-
panying structure, the class-based state, must be overthrown for the majority of people (the
working class) to be liberated. They propose to abolish the state by first capturing it and using to
destroy capitalism. When the workers have seized control of the state machinery there will be
a period which Lenin calls the dictatorship of the proletariat. This will be a reorganizing period,
after which the state structure will no longer be needed and will wither away.
However, the state is a tool of the oppressor. Why should people use the oppressor’s tool? Why
should they abolish class society from above, rather than from below? The tool of government
is modelled to implement the government of the many by the few - once a revolutionary party
has seized that tool is it not in danger of losing its identity as part of the many and becoming the
governing few?

The State organization, having always been, both in ancient and modern history
(Macedonian empire, Roman empire, modern European states grown up on the ruins
of autonomous cities), the instrument for establishing monopolies in favour of the
ruling minorities, cannot be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies.
The anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all the main sources
of economic life - the land, the mines, the railways, banking, insurance, and so on
- as also the management of all the main branches of industry, in addition to all
the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, State-supports religions,
defense of the territory, etc), would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny.4

In an approximate sense such was the fate of the Russian revolution of 1917.
4
Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism in The Essential Kropotkin p. 109

6
 So to be governed by the dictatorship of the proletariat is to allow the power which has been
wrested from one small group of people to be entrusted in theory to the whole of the working
class, but in practice only to another small group.

From Plato’s Guardians to Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, to be governed means for the
majority of people to be subject to the control of a minority. To be governed means to lose your
autonomy and be subject to an authority with which you may or may not agree. It might mean
that you are watched, inspected, spied upon, directed in Great Britain…..in El Salvador it means
that you are imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot.
So why do people want a government? Many, like Hobbes, believe that it is the only way to
avoid chaos - they think that people are naturally selfish and chaotic and prone to kill each other.
Is this true?
And why do people think they need a government? Is it not because they are so used to having
one that they cannot imagine life without one?
Is it that they have lived so long in spite of their bonds that they think they live because of
them?

ANARCHISM
Anarchism is the alternative to being governed. Anarchism means, simply, absence of govern-
ment.
The word ’anarchy’ held connotations of chaos, disorder and conflict due to the Hobbesian
notion that without government people would be chaotic.
In the English and French revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term
’anarchist’ was used as an insult, to suggest that revolutionaries wanted anarchy in the sense
of chaos. Then from 1840 onwards, following P. J. Proudhon, people started calling themselves
anarchists, believing that the absence of government need not mean chaos and confusion but
could actually be much better for society than the presence of government.
Anarchism is a development of liberalism and socialism. The liberal tradition is concerned with
the achievement of freedom, the socialist tradition is concerned with the achievement of equality:
anarchism maintains that both must be attained together. Freedom without equality leaves the
poor weak and less free than the right and strong, whilst equality without freedom makes us all
slaves together. Freedom without equality is not really freedom, and equality without freedom
is not really equality. Anarchism arose from the contradiction between liberalism and socialism.
The big difference between anarchism and either liberalism or socialism is that both liberals
and socialists depend on the idea of government. Anarchism maintains that freedom and equality
cannot be achieved within a system of government because government is, by definition, the
control of people by an authoritarian structure.
There is a common assumption that without government modern civilization would crumble.
Many people assume that anarchism is a kind of disorganized spontaneity.

This is the reverse of the truth. Anarchists actually want much more organization,
though organization without authority. The prejudice about anarchism derives from

5
Nicholas Walter, About Anarchism p. 7

7
 a prejudice about organization; people cannot see that organization does not depend
on authority, that it actually works best without authority.5

When compulsion is replaced by consent there will be a need for more organization than ever
before - more discussion and more planning - because there will be so many people involved in
the decision-making process. Organization will take up more time, but the result will be closer
to the feelings and needs of the people concerned.
Anarchism will lead to more complex organization, but it will do away with bureaucracy.
Rather than being the bureaucratic instrument of one group imposing upon another, organi-
zation will be the interchange of ideas between everybody who is involved in what is being
organized.
Anarchists believe that people are not necessarily competitive beings, but are capable of work-
ing together for the common good:

The principle of EACH FOR HIMSELF, which is the war of all against all, arose in
the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyse the wall of all against
nature for the greatest wellbeing of mankind which can be completely successful
only when based on the principle of ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL.6

Working together in co-operation rather than being coerced into doing things would make
work and every other aspect of life more meaningful and more enjoyable for every individual.
Anarchism combines the notion of solidarity with the notion of each person having control
over their own life. People would have a clear understanding of what they are doing, and only
do what they want to do and what they think is right, rather than be swept along blindly as they
have been in the past.

Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of
millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction - God, coun-
try, power of state, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty,
public welfare.7

Like Marx, anarchists believe that people have been alienated by wage labour and used as
pawns by the church and politicians as well as capitalists.
One of the most famous phrases of anarchist literature is Proudhon’s ”PROPERTY IS THEFT”.
This sentiment was not new - it had been part of the Diggers’ outcry in the seventeenth century:

The sin of property we do disdain,

No man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain,
By theft and murder they took the land,
Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.

Proudhon and the Diggers before him believed that an individual has a right to occupancy in
the products of their own labour, but no further - and also that nobody has the right to misuse
either their own of anybody else’s products, either by expropriating, destroying or forcing them
6
Errico Malatesta, Anarchy p. 29
7
Michael Bakunin, God and the State p. 59

8
to produce something which their rightful possessors do not like or want. Thus property under
capitalism is theft, because workers are stripped of the products of their labour.
To achieve anarchism the people must seize control of the means of production by social rev-
olution - and, rather than handing them over to a socialist state, they must destroy the state
apparatus and reorganize production on the basis of common ownership.
Anarcho-syndicalists base their case purely in the workplace. The French word ’syndicalism’
simply means trade unionism. Anarcho-syndicalists today work within the trade union move-
ment and aim to undo the hierarchies which have evolved within trade unions and make every
individual member equally important and equally active - thus preparing the ground for an an-
archist workers’ revolution.
The argument against syndicalism is that, like Marxism, it sees everything in terms of the
workplace and class struggle - whereas many people do not have jobs and there are many other
crucial struggles such as the women’s struggle and the struggles of racial minorities within a
country.
Many anarchists involve themselves in a broad spectrum of struggles other than trade union-
ism - such as anti-militarism, racial and sexual equality, and civil liberties in general.
Some methods of political struggle with which anarchists are particularly identified are pro-
paganda by deed, civil disobedience and direct action.
Propaganda by deed means demonstrations and uprisings which are symbolic actions designed
to win useful publicity. After a wave of violent acts by individual anarchists during the 1890s this
method became identified with violence, but there is no reason why it should be. Anarchism
is often associated in people’s minds with violence, but very few anarchists are commit violent
deeds and some anarchists are pacifists. The percentage of anarchists who have used violent
means is no more than that of other political groups.
Civil disobedience is a particular kind of propaganda by deed which involves the open and
deliberate breaking of a law in order to gain publicity.
Direct action used to mean the opposite of parliamentary action. In the context of the unions
it means what is now more often called ”industrial” action. The point is that the action is applied
directly by the people involved in a situation, rather than indirectly by representatives. The aim
is to win some measure of success rather than mere publicity.
So anarchism is not merely a political philosophy but a practical alternative to government
which people can start to implement now.
Many anarchists get annoyed with philosophical anarchists who believe that anarchism is a
nice ideal but not really achievable and are therefore happy to talk and write about anarchism
but not work towards it. How do we know what is achievable until we start to work towards it?
As Marx said,

Philosophers have only INTERPRETED the world, in various ways; the point, how-
ever, is to change it.8

One reason why some people believe that an anarchist society is not achievable is that they
believe in something which they call ”human nature”. They say, ”Human nature is acquisitive,”
and ”Human nature is competitive.” But nobody can really know these things. All we know is
what people are like in the society in which we see them - and in an acquisitive and competitive
8
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

9
 society people are, on the whole, acquisitive and competitive. There are empirical reasons for
this. It does not prove that people will always be like this.
Many of people’s beliefs are forced on them by the ideology of the ruling class. Why else would
they fight and die for what Bakunin calls ”pitiless abstractions”? Why else would the oppressed
people of one country fight the oppressed people of another country, instead of them all fighting
their oppressors?
We do not know of any such thing as ”human nature”. It is used like Hobbes’ ”state of nature”
- a fictional device dressed up as history and used to endorse the status quo. It is interesting that
the status quo is usually endorsed by saying that things could be much worse without the present
system, rather than saying that the present system is a good thing.
Some people say that an anarchist society would be unstable. Would it? And if it were, would
that necessarily be a bad thing? What does instability mean?
Kropotkin sees the flexibility of an anarchist society as an advantage rather than a problem:

…such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary - as is seen in

organic life at large - harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing
adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and
influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces
would enjoy a special protection from the state.9

When there is no longer government, irrelevant traditions which have become fossilized in
our way of life will be dispensed with. Instead of an anomalous jumble of past and present we
shall have a society which is a true reflection of the people in it at any particular time.
Critics of anarchism often ask, ”What about law and order?” They are concerned that without
”law and order” everything would go wrong. But what is this law and order that they talk so
highly of? It is the laws of the ruling class, imposed by the police to defend the status quo. These
laws frequently do not have a value in themselves, but are modelled to defend the ruling class
and most particularly to defend its property from those who think it should be distributed more
fairly. As the Diggers said,

They make their laws to chain us well…

And these laws can be altered when they no longer suit the ruling class. In February this year
the law was altered concerning Greenham Common - the deeds of the land were revoked in an
attempt to stop the women’s protest against cruise missiles. A similar incident occurred to stop
the Diggers in the seventeenth century when common land was enclosed.
People also ask: ”What about exchange?” and many other important questions about how an
anarchist society will run. The only answer is that nobody knows. The whole point about an
anarchist society is that it will be what its members want it to be. So nobody can prescribe what
it will be like. It will evolve form the contributions of all its members.
Anarchism is the most radical political philosophy. It is easier to say what it will not be than
what it will be - it will not be a system with a government, but what it will be will be determined
by the people who make it.

9
Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism in The Essential Kropotkin p. 108

10
 It is a philosophy which combines autonomy and solidarity by putting faith in people rather
than institutions.
Anarchism is often described as destructive. It is destructive only of government, bureaucracy,
classes, class-based laws, bourgeois ideology, property stolen from the wage-slave - i.e. it is de-
structive of capitalism and the state apparatus - which must be destroyed before people can be
free and equal.

11
 The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

A.
Do we need or want any form of government?
1983

A pamphlet.

theanarchistlibrary.org